Thomas Sowell, conservative columnist and owner of the most slap-dash website I've ever seen, has blown the cover off an explosive new book that would have cost Obama teh election!!! It's positively YOOJ! Check it out below the cheese doodle.
Thomas Sowell, in his latest column published on November 28th, 2012, says that Stephen Moore's book "Who's the Fairest of Them All?" could have cost Obama the election by a "landslide."
Um, how so? Does it contain pictures of Obama in a checked keffiyeh shooting a kalashnikov in the air as he raped puppies or something?
No, worse! It shows that Obama's economic policies are (gasp!!!!) different from the economic policies of a half-century ago!
Read on my pretties, and weep for your mistake in voting for teh Obama!
A couple of graphs on pages 104 and 108 (in Moore's new book) are enough to annihilate the argument about "tax cuts for the rich." These graphs show that, under both Republican President Calvin Coolidge and Democratic President John F. Kennedy, high-income people paid more tax revenues into the federal treasury after tax rates went down than they did before.
Coolidge? Seriously? You're going back to Coolidge to support that argument?
Okay Sowell, you may have gone to Stanford but clearly you need a quick history lesson. Calvin Coolidge was president of the US from 1923- 1929. Life in the Jazz age back then was a wee bit different from the way it is now. Televisions were just being invented. Talking pictures were but a new-fangled fantasy. Charles Lindbergh was only just beginning to demonstrate that people could fly planes for more than five miles without crashing into a barn?. Alexander Fleming was finding out that fruit mold had interesting bacteria-killing properties. In short, times were different.
I wouldn't fly in a 90-year-old airplane. I wouldn't want to be operated on with 90-year-old surgical techniques.... and I don't want my country run on 90-year-old economic policies.
Besides, didn't Coolidge learn something after 1929 or something? I mean, I think something happened to the US economy back then after all the tax cuts and government deregulation going around. What was it called? Oh.... on the tip of my tongue. Oh Yeah...
It was called The Great Depression
Sound familier Sowell? I mean, in terms of economic policy, does the US really need to lie face-down on a buzz saw again? It kind of hurt the first two times....
But wait! No! Teh election! Teh Obama! This book exposes it all!
This is not just a theory. It is what hard evidence shows happened under both Democratic and Republican administrations, from the days of Calvin Coolidge to John F. Kennedy to Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush. That hard evidence is presented in clear and unmistakable terms in "Who's The Fairest of Us All?"
Yeah, I just love how Sowell drops George W. Bush's name in there to try and disguise the fact that all his references are between two to nine decades out of date. Sowell must have spent 2000 through 2008 buried in his study reading this book (slow reader I guess) because there is absolutely no way that the years of Dubya's administration can be seen as successful proof of the efficacy of tax cuts and deregulation. That'd be like lauding McDonalds for defeating obesity. The effect was kinda the opposite.
Bush slashed a Clinton-era 126 billion dollar surplus and added 3.2 trillion dollars to our deficit through his ill-thought-out tax cuts.... without bestowing a single drop of economic growth in return
Of course the whole tax cuts for the rich idea did work during the Reagan years. Do you know why? Because (and brace yourself Sowell, I know this is gonna hurt)... Reagan's America was a long, looooong time ago! Over two decades ago! Yeah, it makes me feel old too :-(
But still, lets look at the global economy back in 1987. China was a closed-off place where 85% of the population lived on only one dollar a day. Foreign businesses were hellishly restricted in China back then and the communist dictatorship had a stranglehold on all industries. India was struggling massively with poverty, a hard-to-shake caste system and a bureaucracy that seemed to cut off economic growth wherever it tried to flower. South Korea was a mess of political instability, trying its best to end a multi-decade authoritarian dictatorship and hold free elections. Japan was a powerful, stable economic power that was starting to rival even the US, but its cost-of-living and workers wages were both higher than that in America so Japan was in no way attractive to companies looking to outsource labor.
In other words, if an industry wanted to make bank and expand, the US was the only game in town. Give a corporation a tax break in 1987 and that corporation would use the money to expand its factories stateside. Give a corporation a tax break in 2013 and it'll say: "Thanks for the dough. Watch me move my factories to China anyway."
You see Sowell, the rest of the world has changed from the way it was in 1987. Countries that we sneezed at back then have now become massive economic powers.... and their workers do great work for far smaller salaries. Outsourcing is the norm. You can cut corporate taxes down to zero and China would still offer better savings and wider profit margins for factory-building.
So how do we compete?
We (Gasp!!!!) follow the economic plan of the Democrats. We reinvest in the public sector (schools, worker training programs, clinics, emergency response and other areas that would be difficult to outsource), notch that employment rate up a few points and offer private corporations the choice of better workers, better product and better protection of intellectual property here in the US.... or whatever negligible advantages China will offer. Remember that by now Chinese workers are starting to demand better wages and working conditions... so whatever edge in frugality China offers as a good provider of labor is narrowing rapidly.
Oh, poor Thomas Sowell. I know. It hurts to be wrong. But this time, you have to stop looking in the past for answers and start looking at the facts. Outsourcing was already a reality in the nineties and yet Clinton did pretty well with our economy with his high tax rates and prudent regulation. It might be best to go back to that plan.
A truly optimistic person might even hope that media pundits would go back and check out the facts before arguing as if the only way to reduce the deficit is to raise tax rates on "the rich."
We did Sowell, we did. And guess what: the facts won. You guys didn't.
Update Wow! Rec List! Thanks guys :-)